Is there a technical term for when cats go crazy and tear through the house for no apparent reason?

Aww.. kittehs.

I have no answers, but, I love it when my boy does that..

Just letting it all hang out. we have a new kitten and she is wearing out our carpet with her catnip crazies.

They call those mad dashes a “vacuum activity” that occur because the cats are bored and lack the chance to exercise their natural instincts, such as hunting.

I call it “Look at that crazy damn cat!”

Its called a spooked cat.
Or scaredy cat.

I don’t know, but I do that on a couple of occasions!

My elderly girls have given that up, but they used to chase each other all over the house, taking turns at who would be the chaser. It may be filling a need to hunt and chase that doesn’t get exercised in a mouse-less house environment. My cats are strictly indoor residents (Persians).

Feline psychosis?

But really, probably not, the field of feline psychology isn’t really big. Give it time and they will come up with a term though :)

I call it a “freak-out; this is not the technical term.

I think cats just get a burst of energy sometimes. It’s probably some sort of predation thing.

“Confuse-a-Person”

Seems fair enough.

One of my two used to do that. Her typical dash featured a run not just around the walls and furniture but also horizontally across the bottom of the Venetian blinds. Sometimes she seemed to hit them all without touching the floor.

The other cat would just look at her and then look at me as if to say “What’s with her?”

“cattyness

I had 2 cats that would chase each other on the wood floors and slam into the walls.

We call it “The 10 O’Clock Crazies” at our house because it happens most often between 10 and 10:30PM.

We call it the Morning Rush Hour because it happens here around five-six am. Then there’s the evening rush hour- that’s around nine or so.

He’ll be fine, then his eyes get a little too big and his head cocks to the side. It’s like you can hear the switch being flipped. Our oldest has thankfully, mostly, grown out of it. The youngest isn’t quite yet two so he’s still sewing his oats. Or the couch as the case may be.

We call it “The Rips,” as in, “Owen has the rips.” This is used to described the ripping through the house behavior (kind of a claws out, no holds barred experience).

Our term is “Wild Willies”.

I’ve always called it the cat-crazies and it seems to be common to most cats.

I think the theory about relating to hunting behavior is accurate.

This is also the theory behind why cats seem to sleep (or doze peacefully) for most of the time.

We like to think that our modern day kitties have been more domesticated than they are in reality.

This mimics precisely their accustomed behavior in the wild—long periods of rest culminating in one or more energy depleting hunting runs.

Even tho they no longer have to hunt for their food, this is their method for burning off all the excess energy they’ve been conserving all day long.